Donald A. Wilhite and Kenneth G. Hubbard Center for Agricultural Meteorology and Climatology University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska The ability to collect weather data in near-real time has improved because of technological advances, enabling weather data users to obtain more weather data over wider areas, and in a more timely fashion. The number of near-real time climate networks is increasi...

In the current human-influenced era, drought is initiated by natural and human drivers, and human activities are as integral to drought as meteorological factors. In large irrigated agricultural regions with high levels of human intervention, where the natural farmland soil moisture has usually been changed significantly by high-frequency irrigation, the actual severity of agricultural drought ...

Drought is the dominant process of crop loss nationally and within Nebraska. Nearly twothirds of the 18.6 million harvested acres are covered by crop insurance (USDA/RMA, 2003; USDA/NASS, 2003). For the most part, Nebraska’s crop losses range from $50 to 75 million in non-drought years, but the losses approach nearly $200 million in drought years, such as 2000. The past growing season (2002) cr...

Increases in severity and frequency of drought periods, average global temperatures, and more erratic fluctuations in rainfall patterns due to climate change are predicted to have a dramatic impact on agricultural production systems. Insect pest populations in agricultural and horticultural systems are also expected to be impacted, both in terms of their spatial and temporal distributions and i...

Introduction ‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’, said Mark Twain. But this famous quote is decidedly inaccurate: people have long contemplated weather modification, and both adapt or adjust to weather conditions, and move towards or away from certain climatic regimes. Southern Africa generally has a high coefficient of rainfall variation, making droughts a fr...

The Central Valley of California is one of the most productive agricultural locations in the world, which is made possible by a complex and vast irrigation system. Beginning in 2012, California endured one of the worst droughts in its history. Local impacts of the drought have been evaluated, but it is not yet well understood how the drought reverberated through the global food system. Here we ...

Examining relationships in spatio-temporal data has lead to the construction of a decision support system specializing in data-mining. Several steps are taken with the system architecture to ensure a robust, easy to use online interface in a distributed environment, including the implementation of developing technologies and effective knowledge discovery algorithms. Drought risk management is t...

The National Agricultural Decision Support System (NADSS) is a web based geospatial decision support system used to aid producers and decision makers in analyzing and effectively mitigating the effects of drought. The NADSS application is unique in its implementation, containing web-based implementations of commonly utilized drought indices including the Newhall Simulation Model (NSM), Palmer D...